Colonel John Sartoris' Mother
Character Key Number:
2
Display Name:
Colonel John Sartoris' Mother
Sort Name:
Sartoris, Mother of Colonel John
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
No
Biography:
The mother of John and (the first) Bayard Sartoris and Virginia Du Pre is never named, and only mentioned in three texts, each time briefly. "There Was a Queen" notes that the "Cal-lina" (Carolina, probably South) mansion she lived in was burned down by the Yankees during the Civil War (732). But her presence remains in the mansion that her son builds in Yoknapatawpha - in the panes of colored glass that adorn a doorway, referred to in Flags in the Dust as her "deathbed legacy to her son" (10) and brought to Mississippi in 1869 by Aunt Jenny; and in the "medallion" of her that John's mother-in-law keeps out of the hands of the Yankees in "My Grandmother Millard" (670).